Artist Who Nailed His Scrotum to the Ground in Red Square Feels “Fine”

By now you may have heard that artist Petr Pavlensky nailed himself to the ground near Moscow’s Kremlin yesterday BY HIS BALL SACK. He was detained by the police, and then released, his “hooliganism” charges dropped.

Video above is NSFW.

If the cops are watching his follow-up interviews with the Russian media right now, they might regretful not charing him because the man is well-spoken, perfectly calm and very intelligent.

In other words, not crazy. Meet Kremlin’s new nightmare.

ANIMAL previously mentioned the public artist when he wrapped himself in barbed wire, naked — as what he called a metaphor of the self-imposed “animal enclosures” and the passivity by the Russian people subservient to the tyrannical Kremlin rule.

Then again, when he sewed his mouth shut while holding the sign, “The action by Pussy Riot was an homage to a famous performance by Jesus Christ.”

Then, he eloquently (and rather humorously) subverted Christian Orthodoxy back to its pure fabled form, the same Orthodoxy that was manipulated to imprison the feminist protest punk band for “hooliganism with intent to incite religious hatred” by dancing in a church to an anti-Putin song.

This time, Pavlensky’s deliberate, calculated action Fixation involved nailing his scrotum to the ground, strategically near but not in the central part of the Red Square, 15 feet away from the nearest cop car, in less than a minute and a half.

The action could be interpreted as a metaphor for apathy, political indifference and the fatalism of modern Russian society. It is not the bureaucratic chaos that takes away the society’s ability to take action, but the fixation on its failures and loses that nails us more securely to Kremlin’s pavement, turning the people into an army of apathetic idols, patiently awaiting its fate.

Right now, when the government is turning the country into one large zone, openly robbing its population and redirecting the financial streams into the growth and enrichment of its political apparatus and other structures of force, society is in anarchy, and in forgetting its strength in numbers, in its passivity, it’s bringing about the triumph of the police state.

Again, Pavlensky performed a straight-forward and physically extreme body metaphor — a fitting, carnal disruption in response to “passivity.”

“I feel fine,” Pavlensky told TV Rain today in an interview, explaining why he declined the option to be hospitalized. “I rationally assessed my state… It would have detained me to stay in the hospital, of which I had no intention.”

He further explained his motivations, citing the deliberate “disruption of visual culture” by staging his brief protest in a location of constant mainstream exposure (echoing the closing statement of Pussy Riot’s Katya Samutsevich as she was being charged). He was near the heart of Kremlin propaganda, but far enough away that he had time — before being apprehended and visually absorbed in the resulting activity — to drive the point into the ground. By his testicles.

Calmly, he elaborated how even the liberal element of Russia’s society is beaten down when the people are focusing on failures — “fixating” on political prisoners staying in jail and other manifestations of the government’s “mechanism of abuse.” The people are “frozen” in their “fixation” on these losses. Instead, they need to look forward; He relates this to the theme of continuation by procreation (hence, testicles) and to life going on, literally. Translated:

I wanted to show fixation with helplessness.

Pavlensky believes that funds are being extracted from the Academy of Sciences and cultural institutions, draining them, at the same time going directly to benefit agencies of government force. As for his scrotum…

The body is a strong material and pain is often mere fear, mere phobia.

Should the graphic video be removed from YouTube, you can find it on V Kontakte.